Gaim is a multiple IM service client, like Trillian. It however seems to be pretty good. Half the memory footprint, and free + open source. I'll post a review in about a month when the honeymoon wears off.

There is a known problem when using Gaim with Cygwin (a linux environment for windows) if you have your system path set to the Cygwin bin dirs. The documentation for gaim actually hints at the fix:

If you have a Cygwin installation (with tcl 8.4), and have added its bin directory to your PATH, then WinGaim will crash on startup. The solution is to remove cygwin's bin directory from your path. Introducing Cygwin dlls into the native win32 environment is a very bad idea, and is likely to cause problems with other programs.

The fix is simple, instead of having the Cygwin paths on your global environment table, you just want it for your shell windows. Write up a simple little batch script to modify the path like so:

@echo off
set path=%PATH%;[Cygwin]\bin;[Cygwin]\usr\bin
echo This is my shell of DOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

After that, setup a shortcut to: %windir%\system32\cmd.exe /K [your batch file]. The /K switch tells cmd to keep the shell window open. Bam. Cygwin and GAIM goodness.

Update: Sometimes Gaim will half-crash on startup. It won't actually die, but it won't do anything else either. This can happen if you install something like WinAVR which uses CygWin, and it adds itself to your path. If you find Gaim crashing all of the sudden, then check out each entry in your PATH environment variable and make sure there are no cygwin dlls.

Yes, you heared that right.

Higher order DOS .bat files.

This is a perfect illustration as to the rabbit hole you will fall down if you start to program in scheme.

What is a higher order .bat file? It is a .bat file that takes a .bat file as an argument.

It is really handy when you have a list of files that you need to run a few different processes on.

But it makes me question my sanity. And then I figure that I can write higher-order bat file combinators. That is, a .bat file that writes higher order .bat files. And then I stop questioning.

I usually VNC to my home computer from work. It used to kinda-suck because even if both machines had the same screen resolution, the VNC Viewer would always have scrollbars (because of the taskbar, and window title).

However, with VirtuaWin, I just make wirtual vindow with the vnc viewer on it, and make the vnc viewer full screen, and BAM! No scrollbars, and it looks slick.

It is also great to see the confused look on my bosses face, because suddenly the Windows NT machine is now XP.

Anyway. Its good stuff. If you have a Win32 box, get VirtualWin.

I found a better RSS reader for windows... RSS Bandit. Very nice indeed.

Also in the RSS division, is Custom eBay RSS Feeds that will let you run a constant ebay search, using rss of corse. Very nice. I already have 3 feeds set up.

Just A quick post... Dave Navarro's CMD Tools is an excellent resource for people who know that Windows has a command shell, and know how to use it.

Whoah. This is way cool. I am using this new software, w.blogger. Hella cool. S9y gave w.blogger my categories right away. No problem. This software looks very easy to use, and is very nice. There is also an itunes plugin which I will get, just as soon as the site stops reporting a HTTP 509 error. (bandwidth exceeded). w.blogger also has an RSS Feed.. SexXx0r.